Quito, Sep 4 (Prensa Latina) The Ecuadorian coastal city of Guayaquil will host the 4th International Book Fair, scheduled from September 5 to 9 at the Convention Center.

With Spain as the guest country, the event will be attended by six Spanish authors: Javier Sierra, Juan Manuel de Prada, Javier Moro, Elena Medel, Maria Elvira Roca Barea, Miguel Gane and Nerea Perez de las Heras, who will present their books and will participate in colloquiums.

More than 600 titles from major publishing houses and a selection from the publication service of Spanish Cooperation will be available at Spain's stand.

Havana, Feb 5 (Prensa Latina) Cuba's Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, will present on Monday a book on the legacy of the historical leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, at the 27th Havana International Book Fair.

The literary event takes place in this capital until February 11, when it will continue in other provinces of the country.

After opening the event, on February 1, Juan Rodríguez Cabrera, president of the Cuban Book Institute and the Fair, evoked the founding role of Fidel Castro, his passion for books and reading.

'That visionary reader dreamed this fair, made it as big as it is,' the researcher said.

One of the first priorities of the Revolution led by Fidel was education and the promotion of culture, for the intellectual growth of the Cuban people, he said.

The book 'Hasta siempre Fidel' will be launched at the Nicolás Guillén hall in San Carlos de la Cabaña Fortress, main venue of the Fair.

Prieto, and intellectuals Eugenio Suárez and Alberto Alvariño, will speak about the book.

The 27th fair features China as a guest of honor and is dedicated to Cuban Historian Eusebio Leal, who in a recent panel expressed his admiration for Fidel's humanism and the legacy of that great revolutionary who died on November 25, 2016.

Havana’s historian talks to CubaSi about the unveiling of the equestrian monument of our National Hero Jose Marti in front of the Museum of the Revolution, the tribute the International Book Fair Havana 2018 will pay to him, and the 500th anniversary of the city.

You never get tired of listening to Eusebio Leal Spengler. Havana’s historian is experiencing intense days right now. The official unveiling of the Jose Marti’s equestrian monument at the Misiones Avenue, true copy of the one located in the Central Park of New York, is scheduled for January 28th. And if it were not enough, the International Book Fair 2018 will be dedicated to him. Besides, the city of his life turns 500 years old in 2019…

—The unveiling of the equestrian sculpture of (Jose) Marti is a long-awaited dream of you. Why such statue? How did you make it happen?

“The statue is a fact. Twenty two years have passed since the very beginning of the paperwork. This process has taken so long due to different reasons; namely, political, communicational…etc. Moreover, the responsibility of deciding whether the sculpture came to Cuba or not went through the hands of several administrations. But we finally did it.

“The sculpture is extraordinarily beautiful. It is a true copy, in details, of the original. It was made possible through the advance of technology. One of the requirements was that the statue could not be touched.

“And indeed, we could do all the documentary research at the Syracuse’s Library, where the entire Huntington’s legacy is, as well as the Hispanic Society in New York, its most important cultural legacy.

alt

Photo: Yuris Norido / CubaSi

"You could see the work of the artist, of Anna Hyatt Huntington, everything she thought about Marti, her motivations. The City Historian Office has today a solid documentation on that event.

"Amassing the necessary funds was another story. Finding them, taking advantage of the precise moment, nor sooner neither later. North American cultural institutions contributed, Cubans in the patriotic emigration, we had an important contribution from a Mexican lady who has always wanted to remain in anonymity, but that also links Mexico to the historical event of the founding of the statue.

"And certainly, it’s important to remember a woman who exalted the genre who almost at age eighty faced the challenge of making a monumental work. She studied Jose Marti’s life, she was even inspired by Marti’s love and sacrifices, as apostle and also as Mayor General. In Marti comes together his political destiny as founder of a Party to lead the armed struggled for the freeing of a colonized nation and at the same time, his character as soldier that recalls that the best way of not fearing the soldier, is being done.

"He was a soldier from the same moment he gets involved in the war he had summoned, and in the moment in that Maximo Gomez, the most outstanding character of the war, next to Antonio Maceo, welcomed him as guide and top director of that project.

"The moment of his death is poetically remembered in this monument. The beauty in it is that generally monumental sculptures, when related to are about great heroes of history are almost always showing them in a triumphant role, but here he is shown in the moment of giving his life for the cause he had embraced.

"The location is much better than that of New York City, because it can be seen in a square, in a large promenade. It has been put there a nature that reminds the trips of Marti: there are the olive trees of the Mediterranean, the araucarias from Central America, the palm trees of Cuba…

"The granite base is impressive. And as the sculpture has a large volume, when approached one becomes dazzled by its beauty.

It will be officially inaugurated on January 28th, coinciding with Jose Marti’s anniversary, facing the Church of the Sacred Angel, the church where he was baptized (in the same church where Father Varela was also baptized), in Havana, the city where he was born, a city that will soon be 500 years old.

"What better way to commemorate Marti’s birth than when his city is scarcely a few months away from turning five centuries?”

- How to approach José Marti in these times?

-Nor with scissors and glue. We cannot approach Marti clipping. We must see a global Marti. That it can be done is to approach through the dissimilar roads he bequeathed to us and proposes: his beautiful epistolary; his love verses, his free verses; the universe of his journalistic literature; he offers us his political action… all those roads lead suddenly to an absolute Marti, to a figure that requires everyone’s personal interpretation.

alt

Photo: Yuris Nórido / CubaSí

“There’s a vast bibliography of his political and moral dimension (Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Cintio Vitier, Fina García Marruz, Gonzalo de Quezada); there’s a Martí in the continental political vision (Mañach and so many others)… but the most important thing is to build our own Marti from the knowledge we have about him.

“We must approach him, dialogue with him. It is pretty good to extract quotes, to take out fragments from his work, thoughts… but the nice, the important thing is to insert those thoughts into the complete work”.

—The 27th International Book Fair will be dedicated to your work. How did you take that news?

—I am deeply grateful to the Cuban Book Institute, the Ministry of Culture, the intelligentsia and the Cuban people. They have been very generous. Not because I come to make the representation of saying “I do not deserve this or that”, because it would not only be imprudent, but also offensive for those who have made that decision.

“But I have always considered that I did little to build a work that would take me to the desk, to the necessary and patient consultation of papers. Life has led me to raise stones and lime, to preserve sources, to rescue books, to look for documents, to preserve collections. It took me to the cult of the word, not as a superficial exercise (the hallow word, the one that says nothing, the Manichean rhetoric), but as a vehicle to express such feelings as the love for the Homeland, the awareness that when we love her, we feel a love for the other, for what surrounds us, the American world, for those who suffer and cry, for those who endure…

altPhoto: Jorge Luis Sánchez/ for CubaSí

“Also for Cuba as regards the accumulation of thought, ideas, the beauty that this country has contributed to the history of America and the world; for Cubans, those I have always felt inseparable part of, part of that people, with their virtues and faults, which are mine; with their lights and shadows, which are mine…

“When I look at all that, I consider that I have done something, I would have wished to do more; once and several times I said that I would need a loam of one life, another more, to be able to do what I want, with the same dedication, as when I climbed stairs in three steps together, as when I travelled long distances daily to reach places”.

“I remember that once an old man approached to me, perhaps he arrived in a timely moment of my life and said: “Listen, I know a technique that perhaps you may remember from your childhood; mothers used to preserve the first year’s little shoes turned into metal: I own that technique; but I am leaving and I do not have family or anyone to leave it with; I am not coming to give you the secret of my work; I am coming to ask you to give me your shoes, those which you have walked through Havana with”.

I handed him the shoes. And when he returned them back to me (they were well kept), I realized that that stage of my life had finished, that I had to begin another.

“Suddenly, children, youngsters began to appear… Even, in a meeting among intellectuals, Fidel told me: “There’s a boy here, son of a friend of ours, Katiuska Blanco, who has replied to me that he wants to be Eusebio Leal’s successor, when I asked him what he wanted to be”.

“It was one consolation that that boy, another or others, are already walking down the streets. I will no longer need another life.

“And if the Book Institute has decided to gather in pages what I once said or wrote, and what has been written and collected from me, and to dedicate this Book Fair to me, I hope it is for good!"

—Havana will celebrate its 500th anniversary next year. How will the historic center of the city take on that festivity?

—Havana has many historic centers. I have already renounced to speak with absolute sense about the historic center. The historic center is perhaps a starting point. But, there are many starting points: in El Cerro, in Marianao, in Miramar, in La Vibora, in Diez de Octubre, in San Francisco de Paula.

“When we talk about the anniversary we not only talk about that past event of the ceiba tree: that is very nice, and we will remember it: El Templete is restored, as well as the paintings, the columns; and the 500th anniversary tree is planted. Two years ago, the other tree showed signs that its time was over and we had to plant another. This morning, I went there early and saw that the ceiba tree was full of green vine shoots.

“Yes, we will celebrate that: the town hall, the first mass, the birth of the city. But the most important thing is what that time means for a city.

altPhoto: Annaly Sánchez/ CubaSí

“It is the time of a university that will soon have three centuries, it is the result of the tireless work of the Economic Society of Friends of the Country (Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País), of the history of Cuban pedagogy, which has an important part in Havana, of its architects and builders, who made a fantastic city.

“Everyone who arrives in Havana says “What a wonder! What a mystery! What city is this?” Even decadent, as Havana is, when you touch it, it revives. Wherever you touch it, except what falls beaten that will always be less than what has been lost in this continent; in the interests of a misinterpreted modernity it was savagely demolished …

“Havana, for a series of events, has remained in its urbanism and splendor until today. We must touch it with love and prevent its “suburbanization”. And above all: we must take care of those who live in it.

“Being a Havanan cannot be a sign of superiority, but to be so (as Alfredo Guevara rightfully said), you need certain refinement, which is born from culture.

“Fidel used to say (and I do not like to quote him very much, I prefer to follow what he taught me instead) that Revolutions were daughters of ideas and culture. Without culture there is no idea, without ideas there is no culture: this is a dialectical and harmonic relationship.

“It is necessary to see what Cuban culture does from this city. It is the 500th anniversary for a ballet, for all Cuban music, for poetry, for legal tradition… But this is also the city of the literacy teachers, the city of the sugar-cane cutters, the city of the glorious and unyielding militia, the city of students, the city of workers, where political movements sprung up…

“We are talking about something great. We need to break that silence on the 500th anniversary. Original Havana was founded in 1514, in San Cristobal, on the southern coast, in a spot that archaeologists haven’t found, but that appears in all cartography of that time. San Cristobal and Havana united in a timely moment.

“It already existed In 1514, but in 1519, according to tradition, Havana was founded in the year when Magallanes was travelling around the world, the year when Leonardo da Vinci (the greatest genius of the time) died, the moment when Hernan Cortes and emperor Moctezuma met in Mexico… At midst a changing world, there sprung up the capital of Cuba, the one that was going to the capital of Cuba, that of the Declarations of Havana, that of the glorious resistance…

“Then, Havana deserves not to be perennially vilified as if it were a sterile city. No, this city has given a lot. That is the city we will celebrate”.

Translated by Cubasi Translation Staff

Eusebio Leal: “We must approach Marti without scissors”

Yuris Norido / CubaSi

Havana’s historian talks to CubaSi about the unveiling of the equestrian monument of our National Hero Jose Marti in front of the Museum of the

Revolution, the tribute the International Book Fair Havana 2018 will pay to him, and the 500th anniversary of the city.

You never get tired of listening to Eusebio Leal Spengler. Havana’s historian is experiencing intense days right now. The official unveiling of the Jose Marti’s equestrian monument at the Misiones Avenue, true copy of the one located in the Central Park of New York, is scheduled for January 28th. And if it were not enough, the International Book Fair 2018 will be dedicated to him. Besides, the city of his life turns 500 years old in 2019…

—The unveiling of the equestrian sculpture of (Jose) Marti is a long-awaited dream of you. Why such statue? How did you make it happen?

“The statue is a fact. Twenty two years have passed since the very beginning of the paperwork. This process has taken so long due to different reasons; namely, political, communicational…etc. Moreover, the responsibility of deciding whether the sculpture came to Cuba or not went through the hands of several administrations. But we finally did it.

“The sculpture is extraordinarily beautiful. It is a true copy, in details, of the original. It was made possible through the advance of technology. One of the requirements was that the statue could not be touched.

“And indeed, we could do all the documentary research at the Syracuse’s Library, where the entire Huntington’s legacy is, as well as the Hispanic

Society in New York, its most important cultural legacy.

alt

Photo: Yuris Norido / CubaSi

"You could see the work of the artist, of Anna Hyatt Huntington, everything she thought about Marti, her motivations. The City Historian Office has today a solid documentation on that event.

"Amassing the necessary funds was another story. Finding them, taking advantage of the precise moment, nor sooner neither later. North American

cultural institutions contributed, Cubans in the patriotic emigration, we had an important contribution from a Mexican lady who has always wanted to

remain in anonymity, but that also links Mexico to the historical event of the founding of the statue.

"And certainly, it’s important to remember a woman who exalted the genre who almost at age eighty faced the challenge of making a monumental work.

She studied Jose Marti’s life, she was even inspired by Marti’s love and sacrifices, as apostle and also as Mayor General. In Marti comes together his political destiny as founder of a Party to lead the armed struggled for the freeing of a colonized nation and at the same time, his character as soldier that recalls that the best way of not fearing the soldier, is being

done.

"He was a soldier from the same moment he gets involved in the war he had summoned, and in the moment in that Maximo Gomez, the most outstanding character of the war, next to Antonio Maceo, welcomed him as guide and top director of that project.

"The moment of his death is poetically remembered in this monument. The beauty in it is that generally monumental sculptures, when related to are

about great heroes of history are almost always showing them in a triumphant role, but here he is shown in the moment of giving his life for

the cause he had embraced.

"The location is much better than that of New York City, because it can be seen in a square, in a large promenade. It has been put there a nature that

reminds the trips of Marti: there are the olive trees of the Mediterranean, the araucarias from Central America, the palm trees of Cuba…

"The granite base is impressive. And as the sculpture has a large volume, when approached one becomes dazzled by its beauty.

It will be officially inaugurated on January 28th, coinciding with Jose Marti’s anniversary, facing the Church of the Sacred Angel, the church where he was baptized (in the same church where Father Varela was also baptized), in Havana, the city where he was born, a city that will soon be

500 years old.

"What better way to commemorate Marti’s birth than when his city is scarcely a few months away from turning five centuries?”

- How to approach José Marti in these times?

-Nor with scissors and glue. We cannot approach Marti clipping. We must see a global Marti. That it can be done is to approach through the dissimilar

roads he bequeathed to us and proposes: his beautiful epistolary; his love verses, his free verses; the universe of his journalistic literature; he offers us his political action… all those roads lead suddenly to an absolute Marti, to a figure that requires everyone’s personal interpretation.

alt

Photo: Yuris Nórido / CubaSí

“There’s a vast bibliography of his political and moral dimension (Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Cintio Vitier, Fina García Marruz, Gonzalo de Quezada); there’s a Martí in the continental political vision (Mañach and so many others)… but the most important thing is to build our own Marti from the knowledge we have about him.

“We must approach him, dialogue with him. It is pretty good to extract quotes, to take out fragments from his work, thoughts… but the nice, the important thing is to insert those thoughts into the complete work”.

—The 27th International Book Fair will be dedicated to your work. How did you take that news?

—I am deeply grateful to the Cuban Book Institute, the Ministry of Culture, the intelligentsia and the Cuban people. They have been very generous. Not because I come to make the representation of saying “I do not deserve this or that”, because it would not only be imprudent, but also offensive for those who have made that decision.

“But I have always considered that I did little to build a work that would take me to the desk, to the necessary and patient consultation of papers. Life has led me to raise stones and lime, to preserve sources, to rescue books, to look for documents, to preserve collections. It took me to the cult of the word, not as a superficial exercise (the hallow word, the one that says nothing, the Manichean rhetoric), but as a vehicle to express such feelings as the love for the Homeland, the awareness that when we love her, we feel a love for the other, for what surrounds us, the American world, for those who suffer and cry, for those who endure…

alt

Photo: Jorge Luis Sánchez/ for CubaSí

“Also for Cuba as regards the accumulation of thought, ideas, the beauty that this country has contributed to the history of America and the world; for Cubans, those I have always felt inseparable part of, part of that people, with their virtues and faults, which are mine; with their lights and shadows, which are mine…

“When I look at all that, I consider that I have done something, I would have wished to do more; once and several times I said that I would need a loam of one life, another more, to be able to do what I want, with the same dedication, as when I climbed stairs in three steps together, as when I travelled long distances daily to reach places”.

“I remember that once an old man approached to me, perhaps he arrived in a timely moment of my life and said: “Listen, I know a technique that perhaps you may remember from your childhood; mothers used to preserve the first year’s little shoes turned into metal: I own that technique; but I am leaving and I do not have family or anyone to leave it with; I am not coming to give you the secret of my work; I am coming to ask you to give me your shoes, those which you have walked through Havana with”.

I handed him the shoes. And when he returned them back to me (they were well kept), I realized that that stage of my life had finished, that I had to begin another.

“Suddenly, children, youngsters began to appear… Even, in a meeting among intellectuals, Fidel told me: “There’s a boy here, son of a friend of ours, Katiuska Blanco, who has replied to me that he wants to be Eusebio Leal’s successor, when I asked him what he wanted to be”.

“It was one consolation that that boy, another or others, are already walking down the streets. I will no longer need another life.

“And if the Book Institute has decided to gather in pages what I once said or wrote, and what has been written and collected from me, and to dedicate this Book Fair to me, I hope it is for good!"

—Havana will celebrate its 500th anniversary next year. How will the historic center of the city take on that festivity?

—Havana has many historic centers. I have already renounced to speak with absolute sense about the historic center. The historic center is perhaps a starting point. But, there are many starting points: in El Cerro, in Marianao, in Miramar, in La Vibora, in Diez de Octubre, in San Francisco de Paula.

“When we talk about the anniversary we not only talk about that past event of the ceiba tree: that is very nice, and we will remember it: El Templete is restored, as well as the paintings, the columns; and the 500th anniversary tree is planted. Two years ago, the other tree showed signs that its time was over and we had to plant another. This morning, I went there early and saw that the ceiba tree was full of green vine shoots.

“Yes, we will celebrate that: the town hall, the first mass, the birth of the city. But the most important thing is what that time means for a city.

alt

Photo: Annaly Sánchez/ CubaSí

“It is the time of a university that will soon have three centuries, it is the result of the tireless work of the Economic Society of Friends of the Country (Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País), of the history of Cuban pedagogy, which has an important part in Havana, of its architects and builders, who made a fantastic city.

“Everyone who arrives in Havana says “What a wonder! What a mystery! What city is this?” Even decadent, as Havana is, when you touch it, it revives. Wherever you touch it, except what falls beaten that will always be less than what has been lost in this continent; in the interests of a misinterpreted modernity it was savagely demolished …

“Havana, for a series of events, has remained in its urbanism and splendor until today. We must touch it with love and prevent its “suburbanization”. And above all: we must take care of those who live in it.

“Being a Havanan cannot be a sign of superiority, but to be so (as Alfredo Guevara rightfully said), you need certain refinement, which is born from culture.

“Fidel used to say (and I do not like to quote him very much, I prefer to follow what he taught me instead) that Revolutions were daughters of ideas and culture. Without culture there is no idea, without ideas there is no culture: this is a dialectical and harmonic relationship.

“It is necessary to see what Cuban culture does from this city.

It is the 500th anniversary for a ballet, for all Cuban music, for poetry, for legal tradition… But this is also the city of the literacy teachers, the city of the sugar-cane cutters, the city of the glorious and unyielding militia, the city of students, the city of workers, where political movements sprung up…

“We are talking about something great. We need to break that silence on the 500th anniversary. Original Havana was founded in 1514, in San Cristobal, on the southern coast, in a spot that archaeologists haven’t found, but that appears in all cartography of that time. San Cristobal and Havana united in a timely moment.

“It already existed In 1514, but in 1519, according to tradition, Havana was founded in the year when Magallanes was travelling around the world, the year when Leonardo da Vinci (the greatest genius of the time) died, the moment when Hernan Cortes and emperor Moctezuma met in Mexico … At midst a changing world, there sprung up the capital of Cuba, the one that was going to the capital of Cuba, that of the Declarations of Havana, that of the glorious resistance…

“Then, Havana deserves not to be perennially vilified as if it were a sterile city. No, this city has given a lot. That is the city we will celebrate”.

Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, Apr 12 (Prensa Latina) An artistic gala at the Principal Theater of Sancti Spiritus -central Cuba- opened last night the 26th edition of the International Book Fair in this city founded in 1514 by the Spaniards and it is today World Heritage of Humanity.

Liudmila Quincoses, Cuban poet and writer, will be in charge of the opening words on Tuesday evening, in one of the most emblematic places in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba's fourth founding village.

The cultural event has toured different Cuban cities, has Canada as its guest of honor and is dedicated to Cuban intellectual and politician Armando Hart Davalos.

Among the volumes that will be available for reading lovers, there is a photo collection of the 90th birthday of the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution Fidel Castro (1926-2016) and very requested dictionaries, storybooks and cookbooks, he stressed.

According to the event's program, on Wednesday the book 'Reto a la Soledad' (Challenge to Loneliness), by Orlando Cardoso Villavicencio, Hero of the Republic of Cuba, as well as the volume titled 'Dios, Chavez y Fidel' (God, Chavez and Fidel) will be presented.

On Thursday, there will be a panel on Ernesto Che Guevara, and the launching of the book 'Che, Entre la Literatura y La Vida' (Che, between Literature and Life) by local writer Julio Llanes.

On Saturday, the winners of the International Contest of Love Letters, sponsored by the Escribania Dollz Alternative Cultural Center, led by Luidmila Quincoses, will be awarded. The Fair will close on Sunday.

The launching of 25 titles by and about Fidel, in honor of his upcoming 90th birthday, was described by Zuleica Romay Guerra, as a gift from the Cuban people, during the closing in Santiago of the country’s 25th International Book Fair, which began in Havana in February.

Havana, Cuba, Feb 18.- A colloquium dedicated to the 90th birthday of the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, captures today the attention of the program of the 25th International Book Fair, Cuba 2016.

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In Sancti Spiritus People also Shouted ´I am Fidel´

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Cubasí.cu interviewed translator Aracelia del Valle from Escambray website on people’s reaction for the journey of the caravan carrying the remains of Commander in Chief Fidel Castro to Santiago de Cuba.